In recent times, both researchers and policymakers have identified the need to develop statistics on cooperatives that can be compared at the international level. This need has also been discussed at the 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) held in Geneva in October 2013,...

The European social model has always been characterized by the active role played in the production of goods and services by a variety of organizations that differ both from private corporations and public institutions. These are private organizations that, while active on the market, typically...

The study of multi-stakeholdership (and multi-stakeholder social enterprises in particular) is only at the start. Entrepreneurial choices which have emerged spontaneously, as well as the first legal frameworks approved in this direction, lack an adequate theoretical support. The debate itself is...

Financial cooperatives and microfinance institutions (MFIs) are the two major sources of rural finance in Ethiopia. Whereas MFIs are relatively new, financial cooperatives have existed for centuries in various forms. The coexistence of two different institutions serving the same group of people,...

Cooperative banks' (CBs) customers have been traditionally described as small or medium firms with poor performance working at local level. Moreover, they are usually involved in tertiary sector of industry or in agriculture and are financed by several sources (i.e., not just banks). This paper...

Henry Hansmann has argued that ownership is best allocated to only one group of homogeneous patrons, the group for which the total of cost of governance and contracting is minimized. This paper suggests a different model of governance, which is inclusive of multiple affected patrons, and which...

Italian social enterprises are not a new topic in literature. Several aspects e.g. theoretical frameworks, quality of work and job satisfaction, networking strategies, and the impact of the recent financial crisis, have been studied from many different perspectives in the last twenty years. Most...